The present invention relates to an accordion door, which can slide longitudinally and which can be fitted to furniture, particularly lockers, as well as to other various frames such as windows and the like.
As it is known, particularly in the field of furniture, e.g. for lockers and the like, so-called accordion doors are vertically divided into two half-wings identical to each other and hinged together at their central part. The central part thereof is shifted outwardly during the opening movement thereof, while the outermost sides of the two half-wings slide toward one another.
Normally, one of the two sides of the door is fixed and adequately pivoted in the piece of furniture, while the other side is slidingly supported thereon and appropriately guided by guide members fitted to the piece of furniture at the upper and lower parts of the door. Therefore, the two half-wings may be moved from a first position corresponding to the closed position of the door, in which they are disposed coplanar, to a second position corresponding to the opening position of the door in which the hinged central part thereof is shifted outwardly and the two half-wings confront one another, so as to expose the previously covered part of the piece of furniture.
Such doors are clearly limited in number in application to a piece of furniture, although it would be desirable and profitable to employ many doors which not only form a bellows structure but which are also able to translate longitudinally.
Several solutions for this problem have been attempted. However, such solutions result in doors which are all known to be complicated and quite unstable.
In fact, a considerable vertical instability of the single doors is always present when they are slid in their opened position and particularly in such doors having wings extending a remarkable amount in the vertical direction, such as the doors of lockers.